Friday Night at the Fights is a great in-house event for those of you trying to spice up your Judo program. It’s a special event we hold at Judo America San Diego during our regularly scheduled classes on a monthly to quarterly basis, depending on our needs. It’s really a glorified randori fest, but it also serves several important functions that I’ll address later on.

The mechanics of Friday Night at the Fights are rather simple. Our junior class is divided up in groups of five to six players for round-robin competition. On our 1200 sq.ft. mat, we’ll have five to six groups. Players sit along the wall waiting their turn to fight. All groups fight at the same time. Each group is assigned a referee to conduct the matches. We only focus on positive scores: no penalties. Referees have a stopwatch and have the discretion to let matches go longer than Ippon. We usually try to keep the matches at two minutes in order to give our players many matches. After the round-robin competition, players randori with players who were not in their group.

Randori at the end of Friday Night at the Fights

For the adults, we do things a little differently. We’ll do several rounds of randori, then get one pair to fight a refereed match while everyone else rests.

To get the right atmosphere, we set up our bleachers, pack the dojo with extended family members and friends, and require them to make noise. On occasion, members of other clubs join us. It only takes three or four visitors to make the event more interesting and fruitful.

Round-robin matches as parents watch

The main reason we hold Friday Nights at the Fights is to provide a comfortable, tournament-like environment for our players. This is especially important for those players who don’t yet compete in sanctioned events. It’s a stepping-stone to participation in higher-level competition.

It’s also a great promotion evaluation tool for me because most of my juniors perform to the best of their ability during this event. It’s amazing how much harder they try when points, wins, and losses are at stake in front of an audience. It also helps me better gauge how much I can push my players in regular practice because I know they are capable of working harder and being tougher when it matters.

Friday Nights at the Fights also serves as a training ground for our coaches who get to referee the matches. If we need to train our newer parents as table helpers, one of the junior competition groups is assigned a scoreboard and a few parents-in-training who learn to timekeep and scorekeep under the watchful eyes of a veteran table helper.

For our pre-Halloween Friday Night at the Fights, we added a potluck dinner at the conclusion of the event, and we encouraged our kids to change into some version of the costume they would wear on Halloween. For future events, we may consider pizza or hotdogs and hamburgers to keep it simple.

Halloween costumes

The chow line: too much food as usual!

The best part of Friday Night at the Fights is that it’s quick, free, takes little to set up, and the parents and kids love it. I’m sure your club will love it too!

P.S. As I write this, it’s the U.S. Marine Corps’ 234^th Birthday. So to all you Marines who may be reading this blog, Happy Birthday!